NOTA Fall 2023

drawn by Kristiana Engel

I spy a watch reading 7:30, UWEC photographs, three M+Ms, a little angel, and a little yellow house.

TABLE OF CONTENTS LITERATURE Eliot Gannon

1

Josh Holness

Evie Heidel

3

Liam Flake

Maddie Howard Riley Lennon I. Cory

6, 54 10, 40, 67 12, 57

22 27, 62

Mitchell Kallenbach

29

Declan Melchoir

47

Laine Sullivan

50

Dragon Ramme

13

Cade Fisher

61

Halcyon LeRoy

17

Anastasia Larson

64

Sophia Schmitz

19, 51

Gracen Ember

73

Nicole Cummings

21

ART Bea Martin

2, 44

Anna Carlson

32, 53

Kendra Lene

4, 5

Abby Hable

33

Meghan Buesgens

6, 54

Rachel Kopp

36

Duncan Berg

11, 66

Maggie Armstrong

46

Haylee Schrieber

14, 25, 74

Weston Balfany

48

Scout McKnight

16, 20, 58

Devin Valentine

60

Macey Majewski

18, 38, 43

ND Vang

63

Ruby Sonnek

26, 34, 39

Delia Brandel

65

Christopher Ehlert

28, 72

Sydney Beckfield

70, 71

Dear reader, At last, you hold the Fall 2023 issue of None of the Above, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s award-winning literary and arts magazine.

While our issues are not themed, we often find the hive mind of our university community coincidentally brings us art and writing on similar themes. Beasts, creepy crawlies, and other frightful delights reign in these pages: rodents find comfort from one another forevermore in Liam Flake’s “Memoirs of a Rat King,” man meets giant insect in Weston Balfany’s “Suites Horror,” and Josh Holness’ mysterious protagonist and bookstore assert the spectacular and terrifying power of stories in “The Bookstore of Juniper Love.”

The design of this issue was inspired by our childhood love for the iconic I Spy books, filled with intricate photos of miscellaneous objects spread across the pages. Each designer created their own I Spy page in a style of their choosing with any objects they desired. The I Spy pages are spread throughout the book—giving you a chance to pause and find the objects, including some that are mentioned throughout this very edition.

As always, we have many people to thank for the success of this issue. Our staff members, for the labor of love they put in each page. To our faculty advisors, Dorothy Chan and Mykola Haleta, for their guidance and encouragement. To our submitters and contributors, for trusting us with your art and writing. To the Student Senate Finance Commission, for keeping the lights on. To Candis Sessions in the English office, for helping put out every administrative fire that comes up.

And to you, reader, thank you for supporting your artistic and writing communities.

Happy reading, Emma Friend, Editor in Chief Bethany Mennecke, Art Director

drawn by Alexia Folkman

I spy two rubber duckies, a telephone, tetris tiles, five rubberbands, and a pterodactyl.

ELIOT GANNON a small suggestion for toxic masculine men

History took a survey consisting of a small sample of some billion constituents, and morality has concluded that your low emotional intelligence scores reflected badly on society and human culture.

Discourse toyed with several possible solutions but ultimately common sense concluded that cognizance would not dislocate your trigger finger. Life and national news supplied evidence to support the conclusion. Stagnancy and belligerence forced an executive decision to deliberate upon a rebranding initiative. When it comes to personal improvement, we think castration is a good fit for you. common sense dictates it might be emptyhanded, but mathematics concludes a level of lightheadedness. We have determined it will promote platonic relationships, romanticism based on love, and clear-mindedness. Our data predict ego mediation, big dick contest mitigation, and even lower levels of football fixation.

Speculation believes it may even lend clarity to matters of consent.

1

BEA MARTIN Rising from the Ashes

2

EVIE HEIDEL From Seed to Sprout

To whom do I owe the pleasure?

A camera flash reveals too much Photos leave eyes looking devilish Silhouettes I barely recognizeBringing myself to look at the stills Do I really look like that?

The camera adds 10 pounds.

Fidgeting with my shirt that now feels too tight.

Chocolate soft serve, frozen gummy bears, microwave bagged kettle corn — slightly burned.

A smell that echoes throughout the hallways, indulging in the poison that will soon kill you.

Mirrors are a reflection, but an accurate one?

Truth that sits in the depths of the stomach, a stomach that sits below the “waistline”

Are you sure you want to eat that?

Stretchmarks and thigh-chafing little bloody bumps are a constant reminder.

Veering off from the “skinny” stores trying to find something sized extra large.

Friends that say “god I’m so fat” when you can count their jean size on one hand.

Laughing through the uncomfortable pain of self-loathing, A wise woman once said: if all they comment on is your size, then you’re a pretty amazing person.

As an even wiser woman, I took that advice to heart.

I look the mirror in the face.

I am not afraid of you anymore.

3

KENDRA LENE i’m so blue all the time

4

KENDRA LENE so this is how it ends

5

MADDIE HOWARD A Day in the Life as a Maladaptive Daydreamer Afternoon sun peeks through the window of my bedroom as I pace in circles.

I’ve been in this position before, unable to stop my feet as they stalk anxiously around the room. I’m not alone; my friend Maggie is draped off the side of my lofted bed, her head and hair falling over the edge. My panicked state is not new to either of us. We both know that once I finish ranting over the issue at hand, she’ll get a word in and it will return to normal once more.

I voice my concerns to her. It’s getting bad again. My mental health has had its ups and downs over the years, an emotional roller coaster I just can’t seem to get off of. This low has been exceptionally dreadful, and my brain seems to have pulled out all the stops on my favorite form of escapism: maladaptive daydreaming.

This is something I’ve done since I was a kid. After years of being ostracized by peers and forgotten by family, daydreaming has been my only savior. My thoughts concoct wondrous tales of fantasy lands and places far, far away from here in order to protect myself from the harsh truths of reality, where no one cared about me. It stemmed from the fantasy books I consumed by the hundreds like a person starved, eventually moving on to movies and tv shows. Never-ending media became my obsession and salvation.

Maladaptive daydreaming is not to be taken lightly. It’s a real medical condition, not just something people do because they’re bored. Like any drug, you start out carefree and curious, telling yourself that you’ll only do it just this once, until you repeat that mantra, each moment is spent with only escape on your mind. You can’t stop, addiction to the worlds you’ve constructed piece by piece too compelling. Characters you’ve read about are suddenly sitting right next to you, actually interested in what you have to say. You’re transported to places you’ve dreamed about, with the knowledge that everything you worried about before doesn’t exist here.

It’s not just in my head. People are able to walk next to me, just like any other, despite not actually being there. It’s like I can reach out and touch them. At times I’ve tried, so far under the ocean of my own delusion that for brief moments it drowns me, and I fully believe it. Walks to and from classes are my time to converse with my not-real friends, getting their opinions on what happened in class or finding respite in their presence from an upcoming anxiety attack.

6

Insomnia became even more of an adversary than it already was, aiding my make-believe experiences with seemingly endless time into the night, not a care for what the morning may bring. My lack of sleep only fuels my desire to escape, too tired to face my current reality. This is the current issue I’m ranting about to Maggie.

She knows what it’s like to make it through a week on 9 hours of sleep in total.

We’re the same in that way. She’s always much calmer though, somehow always strong and present when I need her to be. We’ve been friends since childhood, and she’s one of the few people I’ve told about my endless imagination. No one else seems to believe me. I knew she would.

The part of maladaptive daydreaming that makes it so dangerous is that it’s constant. You can’t just shut it off. It follows you everywhere you go, taking over your thoughts until it consumes every moment. Talking to myself outloud is something I do constantly. Sometimes you just need an expert opinion, you know?

My roommates must think I’m crazy. So must the other people on the bus when I make weird facial expressions with no words leaving my lips because I’m having a passionate conversation in my head with someone who isn’t sitting next to me.

Zoning out when real people are talking to me is also a common occurrence.

My imagination is always much more interesting. When taking a shower, I have passionate arguments with my family; arguments that, at that moment, I couldn’t deliver a quick enough counterpoint to. In the shower, I always win.

It doesn’t stop at people from real life either. As I get ready for the day, George and Fred Weasley barge through my bedroom door to tell me to hurry up so we can head to class. I do homework with Spencer Reid, sometimes asking for his knowledge on a subject and immediately regretting it as he goes off on a longwinded tangent. Every time I’m even near a large body of water, Percy Jackson stands there next to me, ready to splash me until I’m soaked with Annabeth Chase poorly hiding her laughter as she scolds him for his childish behavior.

Sometimes, I can twist my delusions to work in my favor. Every time I don’t know what word to use in an essay, I turn to one of my friends from high school, Addy. Her highly meticulous nature aids my word search journey, and sometimes, it’s just nice to have her around again.

Other times, this superpower turns into a burden. I can sit at my desk for 7

hours, telling myself I need to get work done, but my friends from all across the multiverse beg me to participate in their shenanigans. I listen. It’s difficult not to.

The work stays unfinished on my desk until I’m able to resurface hours, or sometimes even days, later.

I’ve realized that the reason I partake in this form of escapism is not only from decades of loneliness and abuse, but also anxiety. My anxiety has grown with me, getting bigger as I do, and panic attacks have become a normal, everyday occurrence. Maggie knows. She’s been there for almost every attack I’ve had since I was 15. Getting me to calm down is her specialty, and damn is she good at it.

Instructions of breathe in, hold, breathe out spill from her mouth just as easily as sharp, breathless gasps come from mine.

I haven’t gotten to that point yet as I continue to wear the carpet down with each step, but Maggie watches carefully just in case. At a sharp stare from her, I pause and force a deep breath from my lungs. Another, then another. For now, I am calm. A quick glance at my window informs me that the sun has slipped away and the moon has replaced it; my attack forced me to zone out for longer than it should have. I turn to Maggie to let her know that I should probably get ready for bed but she’s no longer there, disappearing back into my head until I need her again.

8

MEGHAN BUESGENS Cosmo

9

RILEY LENNON ballet

The ocean extends her limitless arms and embraces him in a warm hug.

His arms and legs flail, a hell-bent danseur putting on a show for an empty auditorium.

He sings for his life to no applause while his feet dance violently to a silent tune.

His body contorts, his soul scratching and scrambling to escape through his limbs.

As she squeezes him tighter, demanding an encore, his hands grasp palmfuls of saltwater, palmfuls of saltwater that slip through his fingers over and over and over again.

Only once she is satisfied does she hold his head in her hands and gently lay him down.

10

DUNCAN BERG Ornithomancy

I. CORY Infinite Monkey Theorem: An Ars Poetica

taxed to write in null, a ceaseless binding variant in characters complete and infinite to all but the finite typographer. so simple in stature and speech an aching blindness to rhyme and reason not inherently machine no longer primal and pure we ascend the realm of practicality, dissolve to a theorem a metaphor engulfing the everlasting letters themselves. given the statistical space, how can anything remain unwritten? almost surely—

everything is rendered common destined to retrace each line uttered by the greats, all historical exchanges of human language created both equal and void in the name of probability. and what about you? with knuckles bent and cramped at the typewriter, you are left for eternity to prove a fit of hypotheticals in sequence, soon enough no thought will stand to be original— any and all comprehensible notions one day making their way across the unbounded page, miraculous in nature, but never yours.

12

DRAGON RAMME 無限が消えるとき – 私たちもそうなるのでしょうか

Yayoi Kusama, "Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away”

How do we know what comes before the dawn?

As glowing orbs rest suspended in Aeon fragments of past and future.

Reflections of you and I reach in the dark and light

as if we are suspended in the creases of time. We are floating endlessly Galaxies caught in the threshold, the ascension of our bodies raptured in the glow of 東京.

Which eternity do you envy?

There’s no telling what the endless possibilities

may reveal to you

13

HAYLEE SCHRIEBER Abstract ‘Eagle Head, Manchester’

SCOUT MCKNIGHT Can You Hear Me?

HALCYON LEROY Double Sonnet for Injecting 200mg of Testosterone: A Bimonthly Transmutation Ritual

If I could choose, I’d bruise like a street fight er and not an overripe peach to feel the fibers of my being stretched taut as a bowstring just before an archer fires — I want to feel fire, release this thing squirming in my chest, let this thin skin burst like a grapeskin when I sink my teeth in—

I want

but I don’t mean those plastic bag, store bought grapes coated in chemical dust, lacklust er, no I mean the bunches dionysus dangled over satyrs’ lips, while wood nymphs gripped each other by the roots & writhed — rough bark & rougher bite: serpentine, I’ll coil

& unwind, I’ll swallow the moon to prove

I am more ouroboros than woman.

Shapeshifting in slow-motion: each full moon, I revel in the phantom sensation

of needle piercing quadricep, deeper than skin, yet not quite bone deep & eyelet the burning ache consumes me, a moth licked

by the flame — hedonist, you’d understand what I mean when I say there is pleasure in this pain, there is liberation in

stretching the untruth of anatomy until it snaps like a beam of light, cut clean and sharp as a peach slice with a cheap knife, drawn & quartered: sever me from womanhood, let me rupture & let me bruise.

17

MACEY MAJEWSKI Wistful and Sanguine

SOPHIA SCHMITZ For Elise Elise wanted to attend college but when she mentioned that to Ralph, he laughed himself hoarse at the suggestion, so instead she married him.

When he ran toward her across the disheveled yard, less than a year later, Elise already knew he wasn’t coming to help her hang up the laundry. Ralph stopped a few feet in front of her, his big body swaying to a halt. He looked out of breath and when he opened his mouth the words came out rushed.

“She’s not breathing. I think she died.”

Elise sucked in a breath. She let the calico dress and basket of clothespins slip from her hands onto the brown patchy grass beneath her. Another inhale and Elise sprinted toward the house. Her body protested the invigorating exercise so soon after childbirth, but Elise pushed on. Something tore in between her legs, probably the messy stitches the neighbor sewed to stop the hemorrhaging. Blood slipped down her thighs, but Elise paid no attention to it as she sailed over the rotting steps onto the crooked porch.

Barging into the little bedroom, Elise hurried to the crib. Her fingers shook as she tilted the cradle towards her and peered inside. A small form lay nestled in the blanket; a small, pale unmoving form. Choking, Elise gently lifted the baby from the cradle to her chest. The child was cold and stiff with just a hint of color left in the small lips, as if Elise missed her baby’s death by a few minutes. She felt for a heartbeat and looked for signs of breathing, hating what she discovered. Quite in shock, Elise stumbled to the kitchen but only made it to the doorway. There, she slumped over, surrounding her child with lank, greasy hair, as if she could shield her one last time.

The screen door banged shut and Ralph emerged through the dimly lit kitchen. He jerked to a halt once he saw his wife. The floorboards creaking under his weight was the only sound in the world. Her house dress was plastered to her legs with crimson blood. His eyes traced down to the bloodied braided rug underneath his wife’s feet, the one they received as a wedding gift. Slowly, Elise lifted her dark mass of curls and focused a haunting gaze across the room. With surprising strength, Elise pushed herself off the doorway and limped forward. Ralph sucked in a breath.

“Take her and call my mother,” Elise whispered into the dark.

Ralph took the baby from her arms and turned to watch his wife exit the house. With a final bang, the screen door shut.

A cool breeze caressed Elise’s skin as her mother stitched her back up. She refused to go back inside so she laid on the earth as her mother worked, wishing that she too could sink into the earthly embrace forever. Salt slipped down Elise’s cheek into her ear, not from the pain of the stitches, but rather from the decision she would have to make.

When the blue darkness came and the stars rose in the sky, the moon shone down on the track cutting through the prairie, soon obstructed by the rushing locomotive that transported her to another place and time.

19

SCOUT MCKNIGHT Everyone’s Beginning

NICOLE CUMMINGS Rubberband

I still listen to that song but it has a pinch now.

I hear the melody and I love every word but sometimes I tune into the bass and follow the memories it contains.

It leads me to the dock in August where this song was playing and we were laying watching the stars, right before you— like an hour before you— I turn the music off.

That is such a good memory, such a good song, but from where I’m standing now I know where that version of me finds herself in an hour.

Intoxicated, with your hands slithering down my body and I cannot find the word “stop.”

I wake up next to you, scared; We drove home. In the car you play the song. I sit in the back with my foreign body and we don’t say a word about what you— when you— I told you not to tell anyone, but was it my secret or yours?

21

JOSH HOLNESS The Bookstore of Juniper Love “It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”

– Agatha Christie, The Clocks

Juniper Love owns a bookstore. It is small and tucked away between iron skyscrapers and old stone halls. It is curtained by smog from cars and splintered, rotted wood. It wears a coat of old ivy and glasses of yellowed windows. The door creaks when it swings, the walls shake when you stomp, the windows cackle when you get too close. This bookstore is old and needs work, but Juniper is too busy with what’s behind the door hidden between the shelves. The shelves of stories from ages lost and ages to come. Stories where boys kiss boys and girls fuck who they want. Stories of kings and their many wives and the wives of many kings. Stories with missing pages and names and places. Stories like yours, or mine, or hers, but none of Juniper Love.

The old door, it creaks and through it steps a patron. He is tall. His hair is fiery. His face is soft and his eyes are scanning the store. Juniper is nowhere to be found. She’s too busy with what’s behind the door—the other door, the one inside her bookstore, behind the shelves, beyond the wood, into the air. Behind this door is Juniper Love’s secret. The secret is Juniper Love is a monster.

Her shelves are as tall and taller than most men. Her books are older than time and bound in leather as old as the earth. In these books there are other stories of children lost to woods and monsters (not Juniper Love). There are sailors who fight great, big, white whales. There are princesses in old towers and princes searching for flowers. There are stories of mothers looking for and mourning lost children. There are stories Juniper Love has not read.

The man peruses. The man looks. He reaches and holds a book in his hand.

He breaks its spine. The bookstore coos. The man flips the page. He reads the book.

The first page and then onto the second then he turns to the third and the page rips.

The windows rattle. The man keeps reading. The store keeps whining.

Juniper Love is in the bookstore but is also not in the bookstore. She is with her secret. Her hair was black before the graying began. Before the thin, wispy silver strands began flowing from her scalp like water in a cup too full. Sometimes, she thinks of dyeing. Sometimes, she thinks of letting it grow. Sometimes, she wants it to 22

grow. But as old as the building is, Juniper Love will never be that old. She will stay in the bookstore and tend to its needs. When it needs cleaning. A change. When she must stock its shelves with literature from times old and new, of leather and paper.

She feeds the bookstore well and she loves it even more. She cares for it. She cares.

The man’s fiery hair is stark and wild. He wears a pinstripe suit. Navy with golden cufflinks. He holds a pair of glasses in his hands. The lenses are smudged with his fingerprints, the arm hinges loose and rusting. He takes the book he reads to a corner with chairs. He sits, he continues to read. Every odd-number page so far has been torn by his fingers. His firm, well-adjusted fingers which he licks to turn the pages, which he uses to feel the paper of the book: the grain, the words, the edges.

The man crosses his leg over his knee.

Juniper Love has exited through the door in the bookstore. She stands in its frame and surveys. She watches, she observes, she notes the man in the chair and his fiery hair. He is pale with green eyes and a crooked nose. He is handsome, but still pale. Juniper is not fond of the pale ones. She hears a page tear. The windows rattle.

She presses a hand to the wood of the wall. Juniper Love moves through the bookstore like it is second nature. Her footsteps are not steps but memories. She knows the entire layout. She gave birth to this store and she knows it well. She sees the man and she approaches. Juniper stands over him, arms behind her back and her face stricken expressionless. The man does not notice her, or perhaps he does but chooses not to acknowledge her. Juniper takes note of what he reads. She holds back from taking it from him. She steels herself, then clears her throat.

The man knows she is there. She is not small nor is she large, but she is a noticeable woman with her black and gray hair, her dark skin, and the eyes of a brooding, aging woman full of discern and discretion as he reads. He doesn’t even shift. He remains still as he reads down page five then onto page six. He reads until he reaches the end, turns to page seven, tearing the bottom edge of it. He reads down.

The woman is still there. She stays there but he refuses to acknowledge her. He turns to page nine.

Juniper grows irritated with him. She feels his purposeful disregard of her and it causes her to shift her feet some. She places her fingers on the book, pushing it out of the man’s sight, and then places her other hand’s fingers beneath his chin.

She lifts his gaze. His eyes are very green.

“This book is not for sale,” says Juniper Love.

The man replies, “I am George True.”

23

“George True, this book is not for sale,” she grasps the book tighter, pulling.

George True holds on, “I am reading it.”

“It is not for sale,” continues Juniper.

He does not like this answer, “Then, why is it out here?”

“For safekeeping,” she pulls.

He pulls back, “That does not make sense.”

“It does not have to.” She grows irritated.

He shakes his head, “It must.”

Juniper Love feels a blooming ball of anger growing in her chest by this man’s stubbornness.

He says, “Tell me the stories.”

She freezes, unsure of what to say.

He says it again, “Tell me the stories,” he stands, still holding the book between him and Juniper. It is the only thing in the space between them. “Tell me the stories of every book in this store, tell me them all, show me your secret, and I will give you mine.”

Something shifts in Juniper—a puzzle piece into its place, a wire to its cord, or a mountain across the globe. She is tempted. She was always tempted. Juniper Love collected stories but she also collected lives. She reaches for the man’s face, examines it. She stresses the lines on the corners of his eyes. She presses a thumb to his lips, tracing the skin, the edges, the dip of his cupid’s bow. She observes him as though she observes the entire world on this man’s face.

Juniper Love owns a bookstore and in that bookstore are books old and new.

She has stories of old men and wise women; naive children and weary fathers. She has stories of war and peace; she has stories of magic and delirium. In the bookstore of Juniper Love, she has many things. She has many stories. What she does not have in the bookstore is a page about George True. Juniper says his name, “George True,” like an incantation, she lulls his name over her tongue like a marble. She rolls it past her teeth, she holds it on the edges of her lips, she breathes through the letters and, with a swiftness, the bookstore door shuts. The windows rattle and lock. The walls rumble, splitting splinters into the air. The bookstore roars alive and the floor inverts, it breaks, it shatters, it opens like a wound beneath Juniper Love and George True— bright, glowing, red.

She says his name again, “George True,” they fall into the earth. “George True,” says Juniper Love. His face scours with fear and his body trembles. He sweats profusely and he nearly screams. In the wound, George True sees it all.

24

HAYLEE SCHRIEBER The Debate

RUBY SONNEK Angel of Gethsemane

This is a copy of a stained glass design by one of my favorite artists, Harry Clarke.

He was a famous Irish art deco illustrator and stained glass artist. This one from a collection of windows in a small chapel in Dingle. I am fortunate enough to have seen it in person, where the light and colors have a truly mystifying effect.

26

LIAM FLAKE Memoirs of a Rat King

In the spurious winter of ‘28, we press and compound as wall-creatures do.

Scarce in our corners, we curl against late January’s sour cold, which crawls in through floorboards and consumes odd extremities left exposed. The final comfort is that of flesh against flesh, skin taut on a hundred clamouring bodies, below and above, defying space, yielding self into faces of multiplicity. Intertwined, intertangled, twisted tails in fluid configurations in our beautiful bind.

In eternal union of flesh and form, many forms become one —till death do us part.

27

CHRISTOPHER EHLERT Fruit Fly

This piece is based on a news article I read about a species of fruit fly (S. flava) of which the female bugs use the same organ to both lay eggs and rip through leaves.

28

MITCHELL KALLENBACH My Ribs

The ribcage has 24 ribs But you’ve taken them down Like a collection of hangers In one fell swoop You have opened up my Chest cavity You have shown me what it is to love

29

drawn by Bethany Mennecke

I spy the forgotten heirloom (a hair ribbon), blue and gold feathers, eight rubberbands, and tiles spelling out N-O-T-A

ART BREAK

ANNA CARLSON Virtue

ABBY HABLE The Writing Process

33

RUBY SONNEK God of Destruction This is a painting of a statue of the goddess Bhairavi. She is the female version of the god of destruction, Bhairava (also called Shiva). I was inspired to make the background randomly while listening to Orthodox Christian chants; I wanted to make an intense gold background like a church. This goddess is usually depicted in dark colors but for me the bright yellow sun-like designs created a stark contrast.

Somehow I think this adds to the terrifying effect.

35

RACHEL KOPP The Starving Artist

A series of 3 digital artworks, these depict the slow decline of an artist faced with hunger and the looming concept of death due to lack of money. This plays on the common idea of the starving artist, taking it in the most literal sense possible while also revealing that sometimes being an artist alone cannot keep food on the table. It relates heavily to the worry some art majors face about how successful a career may be.

MACEY MAJEWSKI Flowers from August 2022

38

RUBY SONNEK The Coronation of Ivan the Terrible

This is an ink drawing of a particular scene from Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. This movie, created under Stalin, tells the story of this first and terrible dictator of Russia and is highly artistic. The first scene is his coronation scene and is filled with sumptuous imagery. It is a grand and ironic celebration of celestial and temporal power.

39

RILEY LENNON La Casa de Azar The house stared back at me like a predator stalking its prey. I was 18 the last time I was here, and looking at the overgrown front porch I could still see my sister Ada hugging my mom, clutching onto her bathrobe as she screamed at me.

“Covarde.” A coward, she’d called me. “You can’t escape your fate!” My mother’s words rang in my ears, but not as loudly as they used to. Though it didn’t feel like it, it’d been ten years, and I’d forgotten the sound of her voice after five.

I rarely think about my childhood—about this place. Leaving was the best decision I’d ever made. Now that I’d returned, the memories poured into my brain, and I couldn’t help but swim around in them. As I made my way to the front porch I glanced over at the pet cemetery, now teeming with weeds and vines. Most of the tombstones were so old and worn down that the names were illegible. Hamsters, bunnies, and gerbils, dead, forever, their names forgotten, never to be spoken again.

The few headstones that remained were gentle reminders of my youth. “SLINKY, 1998 - 2012. Forever in our hearts.” Slinky, our orange tabby cat, who ran out of the house one night when the door was left open. We found half of her the next morning, the other half presumably a fresh meal for a coyote. “CHOWDER, 2005 - 2007.”

I had almost forgotten about Chowder, Ada’s pet rat. Poor bastard was squashed to death when he ran out in front of the plumber. Can’t say I blame the guy. I squinted at another gravestone, slumped over in the corner beside what was left of the picket fence. The epitaph read “JINGLES” and I struggled to remember ever owning a pet by that name. I pulled my flask out from my coat pocket, poured one out for Jingles, and threw my head back as I slogged down what remained.

Approaching the front porch and passing by the mailbox, I rubbed my finger across the rusted Z, the only letter left of what used to read AZAR in bolded silver. My mother’s words crept into my brain once again. “Azar is bad luck,” she’d say. “I should’ve known better before marrying your father. He cursed me. He cursed all of us. Pedaço de merda…”

My mother, born and raised in Brazil, was an incredibly superstitious woman. She met my father, a Persian man, when they studied abroad in America.

For an irrational thinker like herself, I’m sure it was quite easy to blame all of her problems on a “curse,” considering her new last name translated to bad luck and death in Portuguese.

Only after fiddling with the front door for a few minutes did I realize that my mother must’ve changed the locks over the years. “Nutjob,” I muttered to myself as I stomped off the porch, praying that she hadn’t been as paranoid with the 40

backdoor. The wind carried itself off the surface of the lake and into the side of the sad, debilitated house, shaking the loose wood panels and causing the windows to tremble.

In the backyard, what I remembered to be a small shore had receded and grown into a larger bay. The gulls basking there dispersed as I approached, hovering overhead like vultures waiting for their meal to die. I stood and stared in silence at the small white cross in the sand. The depressing, nameless memorial was for my cousin Francisco, who drowned there when he was seven. I was ten.

“It was the nastiest storm Nebraska had ever seen. Francisco was skipping rocks when the winds suddenly hurled him into the sky, carrying him up to the clouds like a kite.”

That’s how my mother would’ve told it. I’m sure it made her feel better to believe those fanciful retellings, but the reality is that Francisco was pulled in by a wave, and I helped his father haul his lifeless body to shore.

As if I needed to be reminded of that.

I sarcastically thanked my mother from beyond the grave for keeping the backdoor lock unchanged all these years as I stepped inside. It looked and smelled just as I’d remembered, the musty stench filling my nostrils with nostalgia. I rubbed my father’s cheek as I passed by his framed photograph in the dining room. “Olá, Pai,” I whispered. “Eu sinto sua falta.”

The china cabinet was still filled with the same junk: cheap plates, mugs, and other Peachie-O memorabilia—the company my grandfather worked for, and whose unnaturally sweet canned peaches I have to thank for feeding me as a child. As I gloss over the souvenirs, I can’t help but be reminded of my grandpa’s insanity. He’d locked himself in the cellar to avoid the “curse,” eating nothing but canned peaches for the last six years of his life. He walked out in front of a train one day. I was thirteen. It wasn’t too hard to cope with because he’d already been dead to me for a while. I’d see him once every two months when Ada and I would bring him more peaches, but that was it, and one day we stopped making deliveries. So what?

Not wanting to stay in the dark cabin a minute longer than I had to, I lumbered up the crooked stairs and into my mom’s room, where I was met face-to-face with my grandma. I let out a yelp of surprise, and she laughed at me.

“I thought that was you I heard down there,” she said with a smile.

“You scared the shit out of me!” I said. “I didn’t think anyone else was here.”

“Whose car did you think was parked outside then, smartass?” She said as she punched my shoulder.

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She slowly waddled over to the foot of my mother’s bed and picked up a stack of photos, presumably picking up where she’d left off. They were photos of her son—photos of my father. I said nothing for a moment as she began thumbing through the pictures.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, after a while.

“Same as you,” she replied, peering up at me from over the tips of her thick glasses. “I’m gathering the good stuff before the Treasury solicitors come by and sweep the place clean.” She opened a cigar box on my mother’s nightstand, revealing a few pearl bracelets and earrings.

“Wills, burial wishes, paperwork… we both know she wasn’t into that sort of thing. Take what you want, of course, she was your mother after all. Just leave me a little something, yeah?”

“Actually, I just came for those,” I said, pointing to the stack of photographs in her hand.

“Oh, take them, darling. I have plenty of photos of my sweet baby boy back home.” She handed me the photos of my father and I placed them in my coat pocket.

“I’m guessing you won’t be at the funeral, and I don’t blame you,” she said.

“I’m not going either. That bitch—and sorry, but she was—she never had anything good to say about my Amir. Always curse talk. Maybe she held the curse. Cursed to die alone.” Grandmother stared past me for a moment, glaring at nothing before returning to reality and giving me a sympathetic smile.

“But she was your mother, dear. I’m sorry. I should be more kind.” She tucked her arm around my waist and gave me a half-hug.

“I dunno,” I replied. “Maybe we are cursed. Or hexed by witches. Doomed

by God himself,” I rambled as tears built up around my eyes. “We’re the only ones left. It’s not fair. I couldn’t even go to Ada’s funeral!” My grandmother’s hug became a full embrace as I wept, soaking her shoulder with tears and snot.

She rubbed my head as she whispered, “Do you know what Azar means to me? What it meant to your father? It is not bad luck, it is not death. Azar is bold.

Azar is passion. Azar means fire.”

As I drove out of the neighborhood, I stopped my car under a streetlight and sat on the hood, taking one last look at the rotten old house in the distance. I pulled out the photos of my father and skimmed through them with a smile. After admiring each one, I placed them neatly back in my pocket and got in my car.

My eyes met with the house one last time in the rearview mirror, where I saw a tremendous flame erupting from my mother’s bedroom window.

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MACEY MAJEWSKI Creation of Buscuit

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BEA MARTIN Untitled

MAGGIE ARMSTRONG Letter to the Choking

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DECLAN MELCHOIR Hazard Lights “Beauty belongs to all the people. And so long as I am President, what has been divinely given to nature will not be taken recklessly away by man.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson, on passing the 1965 Highway Beautification Act

I like to believe that WI-29 was constructed for me to escape, divine intervention on behalf of unspoken, intangible future plans. But the WisPave design program has been in use since 1972, concrete laid in the spirit of American expansion, failing to consider anything else— About 68 miles west of Green Bay, an old man wearing a heavy flannel shirt and light blue Levi’s is looking down at a black, furry mass – unmoving save for the wind from passing cars. The hazard lights on his white tacoma shower his back in blinking golden light; but these are all things I’m unsure of—

I dream about you once or twice a week these days. In my dreams you slink off and make your escape into the farmland beyond the road. You evade the truck at the last second, a broken concrete mixer strapped motionless in the truck bed as he speeds by.

The man continues driving, never turning his head from the road.

They call it Bloody 29. Dead animals line the side of the road, designated cleanup impeded by budget cuts.

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WESTON BALFANY Suites Horror

LAINE SULLIVAN Neighbor

It couldn’t have been me, that echoing scream that rang out from across the hall. Maybe it was a crying baby, an angry husband? I stand in the hallway, looking through the peephole and wondering why you lock yourself away. Are you afraid of the spider outside your door? Or is it something that I did? All I can see is a never-ending dark. It swallows any light that may have made its way inside, a hole of infinite questions. The spider in the corner creeps forward and wraps a captured fly in its web. Its legs cycle around and around. The fly flaps his wings helplessly. Pathetically, even. The buzzing is bothersome. Can it give up already? And can you, neighbor, stop making that noise? I am engulfed by your sorrow as it grows louder and louder. On the other side of the hall I hear the door to the stairwell open. Footsteps approach, heavy and slow. They’re going to hear you too, is that what you want? To disturb everyone? I knock and you continue to ignore me. The stranger around the corner walks closer still. I kneel to the ground and peer under your door. At first I only see more darkness, but then I see your shoes. And I realize now that I wasn’t looking in, I was looking out. And you, on the other side, were looking in. The footsteps pause, and the buzzing is over now. I jolt up, searching for your endless gaze. I can’t hear your voice anymore. So I beg you, please open the door.

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SOPHIA SCHMITZ The Forgotten Heirloom: An Ode To A Hair Ribbon Those soft baby hairs tickle your forehead.

Peach fuzz is what your Grandma calls them.

Her gnarled hand lifting a cigarette up to her thin mouth.

Smoke curling in the air like the ends of your hair.

Hair that is pulled back by time’s treasure.

A family heirloom that holds memories as well as your greasy hair.

Grandma laughs in between puffs.

She remembers the summer days when baths only came once a week.

Water is too valuable to waste on vanity, she’d say as an excuse.

Sweat drips down your back.

The ribbon flows from your hair.

It becomes a straight line when you run fast, trying to keep up with your brothers.

Like a flag in the wind you represent your lineage.

Sitting in church, the ribbon rests on your shoulder.

Blue like the sky outside of the window.

You yearn to break free.

To dance amongst the wild roses.

When you dance your ribbon does too.

Malleable but solid.

It carries no extra weight.

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but you feel it swing behind you like a pendulum in a grandfather’s clock.

Time ticks by, though grandma would say that is not how you should measure the day.

Her hunched back is curved over the sink while bread bakes in the oven.

Her strong voice cutting througha room.

A sharp tug on your ribbon.

Brothers running wild with mischievous grins; you stay behind because you are the one wearing the ribbon.

It is also an anchor.

A soft murmur outside the screen door.

Cicadas making music, hoping to attract a mate.

You’re too smart to fall for a silly boy, Grandma praises.

A nice man is what you need.

You wonder if someday, your granddaughter will stay behind to labor, rather than wade knee deep in the stars.

Outside the tiny window, the moon cuts a path on the pond ahead.

Brothers stand adjacent, their poles cast into the cobalt depths.

A gentle look at the dingy Blue adornment.

A quick smile for luck; and then you’re running.

Becoming one with the swaying grass, letting your ribbon dance with you.

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ANNA CARLSON Coralbot

MADDIE HOWARD The Little Yellow House Every once in a while, when I feel overly melancholic or nostalgic, I drive through the neighborhood where I grew up. I pass tight, pothole-filled streets and even rougher back alleys to reach back into a simpler time, one filled with innocence and ignorance. Usually, during these drives, I stop in front of my old house, or at least the place it once stood, and attempt to keep tears from flowing as I think about my life before everything changed. Whether that change was for better or worse is still up for consideration.

This one-story, rickety, seemingly yellow house begins, in my story at least, as a starter home for my parents, freshly graduated out of UW-Madison. These high school sweethearts took a beaten-up house with outdated appliances and tacky wallpapers and made it a home. My dad, ever the handyman and firm believer of “I’ll just do it myself,” spent long hours knee-deep in dirt, wood, and tools to fix up the space. First came the garage, built from scratch with plenty of help from friends and parents. Next, a large deck in the backyard for hosting the dinners my mom always dreamed of. Then came every indoor remodel you could think of: basement flooring went from ugly green carpet to a mix of smooth hardwood and brown shag, the sun porch turned into a nursery, privacy fencing went up around the property. Most of the indoor changes I can remember because I witnessed their transformation.

When I go back to this house, either in memory or in person, I like to walk through it as if I were still there, existing as a child who only saw magic and adoration in the world around her. This place was my haven, but that didn’t stop me from seeking out the danger in it when I could. One spot I remember getting lectured at for adventuring into was my youngest sister’s soon-to-be nursery. My dad repurposed a sun porch once used as storage. First he tore out the floors and started anew for the bedroom. From the door where my other sister and I stood to watch my dad work, the jump to where the dirt underneath his feet felt like six feet.

In all honesty, it was probably only just a step down. Another slice of danger I indulged in was sledding with my sisters and neighbors down the slight hill in our backyard… directly into the freshly placed wood fence at the bottom. Luckily, no dents were made in the fence or our skulls, although from the stern talking-to my mom would give us, my head always hurt afterward anyways. This never seemed to stop any of us from doing it again the next winter.

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The spot that was always my favorite (and the most dangerous) was the line of pine trees separating my neighbor’s property and ours. Within these trees, there was plenty of space for young kids to mess around in between the trunks. I was the one to dub each of these spaces as “rooms” and the fantasy of our own homes began.

Through the years, ownership of these “rooms” was discussed, fought over, and traded between us, but mine was always the one on the very end, nearest to the street.

My siblings and friends thought I was crazy because it was the smallest of the spaces, but I knew better, a secret no one else did. The tree separating my area from the others included a spiral staircase made of branches to the top, where a strong-enough limb could hold the weight of a 10-year-old. I used to sit there for hours until I was forced to come down by concerned parents or whiny siblings. That is where you would find me from when parents walked down the street with their kids, fresh from elementary school just a block away, until the blue sky turned into an orange-red sunset. These trees are gone now, cut down by the new owners of the property to create extra space.

I have so many fond memories of this place, and every time I revisit, it seems that new ones surface in my mind. I remember “helping” my dad make pancakes on weekend mornings. He gave me and my sisters little bowls of mix so we could pretend we were scientists or bakers until we were able to consume them (I always ate the most and was rightfully dubbed “the pancake monster”). I remember baking a cake with my mom in the shape of Idaho for a school project on the potato state. I remember long nights spent at the dining room table, attempting to finish my math homework with my dad, completing it but never understanding anything. I remember practicing my gymnastics beam routines on a stripe of blue painter’s tape placed carefully on the basement wood floor. I remember sitting under the pink and brown comforter on my bed, listening to Jar of Hearts on my first iPod while my sister listened to her own music from the other side of our shared bedroom. I remember the dangerously small bathroom that could not fit all five of us at a time, but boy, did we try. I remember learning the piano in our living room, interrupting whoever was attempting to get any work done that day with the (at times, rough) melodies of Heart and Soul and Hedwig’s Theme. I remember having the world’s longest fart competitions (my dad always the victor), my mom comforting me on the front step as some people took our broken fridge away (I was attached to it, ok?), being terrified of a tornado hitting our house as 55

my family sat in the basement (we got to watch TV, so it wasn’t all that awful).

Eventually, time came to move on. My parents broke the bad news to my sisters and I over Sebastian Joe’s ice cream. It was official; we were moving. My 5th-grade self had plenty of mixed emotions: ecstatic to explore a whole new area, devastated to leave the one we had behind. During our last months in the house, our parents let us go crazy. Any intrusive and destructive thought we ever had was now fully permitted and approved in the Howard household. Wanted to dig a huge hole in the backyard? Sure thing! Wanted to coat the walls in paint and create the weirdest drawings you could think of? Go right on ahead! That time was lawless, except for the one rule of no breaking any furniture. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure I still managed to break that rule somehow.

The little yellow house isn’t there anymore. My parents sold it to a construction company, who split the lot into two residences, both too fancy, too modern, too large for this neighborhood they reside in. The fence and garage my dad built no longer exists. Neither does the life I remember building there. Every time I drive down that street again, I stop to remember; even though the house may be gone, these feelings of home never will be.

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I. CORY Stay the Night

please don’t be afraid when I say I fell asleep to your breathing last night in a world dominated by insomniacs, you were peace in being still. you were gentle plucks of a piano (keys knocking at wood towards the ends of their notes) and you were slow strumming of an acoustic (the pads of fingers brushing across frets, sliding along strings) syncopated patterns of our breathing going on like a song, an interlude to play us between our antheming days— first strong and sheltered like strangers laid in cotton, soon ironed out to an easy rise and fall in harmonizing unconscious voices. with my eyes closed I still feel my bones enveloped in an unfamiliar mattress with my eyes closed I still feel the steady up and down of your shoulders

with my eyes closed I still feel some semblance of music in the silence.

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SCOUT MCKNIGHT Friends, Inhale, Exhale, Lovers

DEVIN VALENTINE Coming Home

CADE FISHER Aubade to Orbiting Alone

A passing of light through the window shades creates an orbit of sunbeams across my eyes.

I can’t take in the universe, so my pillow’s whispers take me back into a dreamscape galaxy acting as an escape from the world I blow through while others blaze past like comets ascending to heaven.

It has never been this difficult to traverse the morning.

Never escaping the hemisphere that keeps my breath from leaving.

The constant pull of gravity cradles me during slumber, a weight always there, covering every inch of me How can a shining star’s light encapsulate my world, but fill my heart with nothing but dread? My eyelids seduce me to return; to hibernation and the black hole that always draws me into its swirling pit of fortitude and silence.

What is the point of a pulsar if its light can burn bright without a constant shine? In and out of consciousness, in a waltz through a constellation never witnessed by a hemisphere missing its north star.

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LIAM FLAKE Orpheus

As we walk towards our garden I glance at you over my shoulder. You laugh; I'm here, you tell me, soil slipping through your outstretched fingers. And as you place the onion sprouts I pray to the divinities of stolen late afternoon moments that you stay, though I know in a few hours I shall kiss you as you step out onto the curb and find sleep empty-armed tonight, though I know we've built this relationship on foundations borrowed from the judicious hands of inevitability, though I know we are beholden to entropy and to the loam you so carefully sculpt. though I have studied the forms of impermanence like a cherished art. but for now I lead the way as we meander in the direction we came from and don't look back, and when I reach out my hand, you take it.

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ND VANG Fledgling

ANASTASIA LARSON calling my younger brother

so wise for being just fifteen— your wisdom on fishing excels the best sources, reeks of what our grandfathers have taught us, and is collected from years of dedication and experience. i go to you for guidance, not because i can’t google it, but because it gives me an excuse to call and check in on you.

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DELIA BRANDEL Incubation

DUNCAN BERG Onsen

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RILEY LENNON Bigfoot It was nearing the end of September and the thin brown needles from the spruce, redcedar, and juniper trees littered the forest floor. I stayed in solitude, as is my nature, waiting for the rain to stop and the air to crispen. In what I’ve called home for many years now, tucked under a rocky mountainside in the Black Hills, I laid on my bed: a rock flat enough to sleep on but not quite tall enough to keep my mangy fur-covered knuckles from scraping the ground. I stared up for so long that my brain created vivid images of fantastical creatures and strange oddities from the points and curves of the gravel ceiling. Light tenderly crept across the floor and up the walls of the cavern as the sun rose. The rain continued to pour outside, just as it had for nearly two days, slowly pooling at my feet, which hung off the end of my stone mattress. My toes dipped in and out of the puddle as I nervously twisted my ankles around. I hadn’t heard the coyotes howl for weeks.

It’d been three full days since Cat ran away. She tends to disappear for a while every now and then, but she’d never been gone from the cave for this long. I worried she wouldn’t be eating enough out there without me to pick berries and fruit for her. She’s a picky eater if I’ve ever seen one, especially for a raccoon. She won’t eat pears off the ground ‘cause they get all mushy and brown, and she’d rather die before swallowing a bug. Even during the drought of ‘71 a few years back, when the pear trees dried up and the dogwood berries stopped blooming, she refused to eat any caterpillars or beetles and instead laid in the back of the cave, belly-up, sticking out her pink tongue to catch the salty water that drips from the stalactite hanging from the ceiling.

She’s too fragile to be out all by herself, and I couldn’t help but worry that the hunters had gotten to her. Maybe Momma had been right all along.

“Our kind’s got no business keepin’ pets,” she’d say. “That’s for them fancy city folk.”

Momma used to scold me for feeding berries and nuts to the squirrels. She’d say I was “wastin’ our food on our food.” She always told me I was going against the natural order, “fuckin’ with the food chain” and all that. Sasquatch eats squirrel, squirrel eats berry.

I never liked squirrel though. You gotta eat around the bones—and they got so many bones. Not to mention I’ve got no right abducting a squirrel or a mouse or a beaver from their family. Just feels wrong. That’s the thing though–Cat didn’t have 67

family. Her nest was nothing but a mess of gunpowder and blood when I found her.

Safe to assume that all that’s left of her kin now is coonskin caps, ugly overcoats, and other distasteful raccoon-style apparel.

As the rain died down and the sun climbed back behind the western horizon, I grabbed a palmful of acorns from my food pile and lumbered out of my cave. The Cheyenne River was about a day’s walk away, but I figured Cat may have wandered that way, so I wandered that way. Shaking my fistful of nuts and chirping out that clicking sound that always gets Cat’s attention, I made my way through the forest.

Brushing away thickets of bushes and branches, I stumbled into a clearing of the river just as the sun poked into the sky once more. I tossed my last acorn into the water and hung my head in defeat. Still no sign of Cat, even after searching the woods all night. Sitting cross-legged at the edge of the creek, I cupped my hands and filled them with water, leaning over to take a drink.

BARK! I spewed out my water and twisted my head, darting my eyes over my shoulder to see— Shit. A dog.

A big dog. Her fur was matted and gray, though it may have been white some time ago. Her limp tongue drooled out of her mouth and dangled by her chin while she panted violently.

BARK! As I slowly stood up, she lowered her ears and made a strange whimpering noise. She twirled herself around in a circle before running to the left, then to the right, then to the left again, skidding her paws into the dirt with each maneuver.

Watching her dart around distracted me for long enough that I didn’t notice the man walking out into the clearing.

“Nala, would you qui—” We locked eyes. As I stared down at him, and he back up at me, the dog seemed entertained, tilting her head from one side to the other. The man wore many clothes with many colors and patterns. He covered his legs, arms, feet—everything but his face and hands. White locks of hair were poking out from underneath his brimmed cap. Humans are like weird little babies in that way- they only seem to grow hair on their heads. His arms were trembling, creating a ticking noise as one of his 68

coat buttons tapped against the barrel of his musket. As I opened my mouth to speak, he whipped his rifle up to his shoulder and fired.

I’m ashamed of the roar that poured out of my mouth. I howled like a monster, frightening the dog enough for her to bolt back into the forest. The man lowered his gun, still shaking, and stared at my bleeding shoulder. I looked down and cautiously tapped the fresh wound before wincing and pulling my wooly finger to my mouth to suck the blood off. Seemingly panicked, the man pulled a miniature blade from his pocket and sprinted towards me. I couldn’t tell if he was letting out a cry of battle or fear.

It was over quick. Humans are small and fragile. I wish they didn’t think of me as a monster, a freak in the night, a “big foot.” It’s a violent, endless cycle. They see me for what they think I am and I’m forced to prove them right. I guess Momma would be proud at least.

I dipped my hands into the water once more and fed the river streaks of red.

As the man lay motionless and broken in a mess of gunpowder and blood, the dog returned from the woods with her head hung low and nudged the man’s satchel.

Drying my hands on my stomach, I made my way over and reached for his bag. The dog’s ears perked up as I pulled out chunks of what smelled like cooked goose. I tossed one towards her and in an instant she clamped her mouth shut on it mid-air.

“Cat would probably like these,” I thought as the dog swallowed her goose nugget without chewing.

I balled up the rest of the meat into my fist, gave the mutt a pat on the head, and began my journey back to my cave. A coyote howled in the distance and the dog howled back. She followed me all the way home.

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SYDNEY BECKFIELD Breakfast

SYDNEY BECKFIELD Harper

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CHRISTOPHER EHLERT Modern Witch

GRACEN EMBER Trauma as Defined by School Song from Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical

A—d—d—might have born you—speak backward: Z to A—thinking you’re able to survive by Being a—jedi—hero—genius—(repressed memories)—you will soon C—after elementary schools—assuming you’re stupid—there’s no escaping trageD—middle schools—assuming you’re gay—hating you—wanting desperately to out you—& Even—after you lose your positivity & your sense of humor—even if you put in heaps of F-fort—you lose friends—left with no one close—you’re wasting enerG—too judgmental to hang with toxic people—your life as you know it is ancient History; your parents buy the bullshit but believe bisexuality is promiscuity: I don’t even know if I am bi or demiromantic in this Christian house: you say—you’ve suffered in this Jail—with a chronic lack of bravery—inexperienced at dating—trapped inside this K-age for ages—one gender identity apart from cutting away your suicide— Living hell—teams tell you to suck dick—ruin soccer forever—if you try you can reMember that before your grandfather lost to an invented fungus—before your life had N-dead—before your grandmother lived every day alone—before your happy days were Over—before your aunt threatened to kill you & your family—before you heard the Pealing of the bell—before your dog attacked the family till your dad put him to sleep you were Q-rius—so innocent—before your father held a thousand criticisms—forgetfulness—pimples— Reticence—you asked a thousand questions—before your sister’s screams at night—& unlS—you want to suffer staying up late—addicted to caffeine & the idea of sex—listen up & I will Teach you—a thing or two—to avoid a family that fights every other day; U listen here—to avoid a gore fanatic of a sexist best friend—you’ll be punished so seVerely if you step out of line—blurting words—horror helps trauma—& if you cry it will be W—should eat ramen every day to heal the credit-card-mortgage-debt—& remember to be X-tremely careful—because this disaster could make like the car accident you had today; Y be a writer when you don’t read enough? Didn’t you hear what we said? Speak backward: A to Z—the end. You were always scared of ending up alone & that’s all that ever seems to happen.

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HAYLEE SCHRIEBER Tiny Community

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drawn by Somerset Seymer

I spy a pencil sharpener, different kinds of thumb tacks, a red whistle, and a BluBox token.

BETHANY MENNECKE

EMMA FRIEND

ALEXIA FOLKMAN

BETH STEIN

Graphic Designer

Prose Editor

KRISTIANA ENGEL

JOHN STRAUB

SOMERSET SEYMER

KATELYN ZASTROW

Graphic Designer

Prose Assistant

RILEY WIGGINS

SARAH SHEDIVY

Graphic Designer

Poetry Assistant

Art Director

Editor-in-Chief

Graphic Designer

Poetry Editor

LEE RUTZINSKI Marketing Director

MYKOLA HALETA

DR. DOROTHY CHAN

Art Faculty Advisor

Literature Faculty Advisor

LITERARY SELECTION COMMITTEE Declan Melchoir Eliot Gannon Sophia Schmitz Liam Flake

FUNDING University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Student Senate & Finance Commission

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